Felipe Fernández-Armesto, an Anglo-Spanish historian, has recently summarised the comparative impact: the independence wars were, in short, the making of the United States and the ruin of much of the rest of the Americas . . . To fight the wars, all the affected (Spanish-American) states had to sacrifice liberties to caudillismo and civil values to militarism . . . People in the Americas often speak of the chaotic politics, democratic immaturity, and economic torpor of Latin American tradition as if they were an atavistic curse, a genetic defect, a Latin legacy. Really, like everything else in
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